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Binary Codes. a Gender-Informed Discussion on Professionalism in Nascent Digital Computing

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Binary Codes. a Gender-Informed Discussion on Professionalism in Nascent Digital Computing http://www.aboutgender.unige.it Vol. 5 N° 9 anno 2016 pp. 103-122 Binary codes. A gender-informed discussion on professionalism in nascent digital computing Mariacristina Sciannamblo Università di Roma Sapienza Abstract This article explores the connections between two analytical concerns within the field of history and social studies of science and technology, namely the demand to reform the history of computing on the one hand, and the use of ‘gender’ as analytical category on the other. I shall bring into focus the “question of professionalism” (Ensmenger 2001) in computer fields as a crucial point through which to shed light on the controversial role of women in computing industry, along with the benefit of aligning the history of computing with feminist perspectives. The article focuses on the dawn of digital computing era in the USA by discussing the work of the first women programmers behind the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC). The argument that I advance is that the attempts to build computer work as a professional field and expertise are in many respects biased by gendered discursive and material practices. 103 Keywords: digital computing, gender, professionalism, women, expertise. 1. Introduction In a recent column titled The Tears of Donald Knuth, Thomas Haigh (2015) addresses under renovate spirit some controversial issues regarding the relationship between the discipline of computer science and the growing body of work on the history of computing1. The article takes shape from a talk given by the famous computer scientist Donald Knuth at Stanford University2. In his reflections, Haigh challenges Knuth’s complaint that historians are following a discouraging trend in doing history of computer science by ignoring technical details and, in so doing, “dumbing down” their mission and outcomes. According to Haigh, the reasons why little technical history of computer science has been produced by trained historians rely upon disciplinary and institutional factors, common both to History of Science and Computer Science fields. Nevertheless, Haigh adds, the blossom of a notable amount of historical works that draw explicit connections between the history of computing and computer science pursues a holistic approach that aims at integrating technical analysis and the attention to social, institutional, cultural and political factors3. Furthermore, in recalling that «computing is much bigger than computer science, and so the history of computing is much bigger than the history of computer science», Haigh emphasizes the fact that historical analyses focused on a broad range of computer-related fields, such as business, cybernetics, semiconductor industry, punched card machines, IT workforce, personal computer, the use of computer in developed countries and in some medical practices, are equally respectable examples of work, other than computer science. Bearing in mind these concerns, I discuss here the issue of ‘professionalism’ in computer work, highlighting some interesting remarks regarding both the field of 1 The article is available at: http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/1/181633-the-tears-of-donald- knuth/fulltext 2 Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAXdDEQveKw 3 All the references are mentioned in Haigh’s article. 104 computer science and that of computing labor. I shall argue that the attempts to define computer work as a profession and technical expertise unveil remarkable gender biases that affected both the composition of the workforce and the birth of computing as organizational culture. Following a chronological order, in the first paragraph I shall reach back to the birth of the electronic computing era by shedding light on the important contributions of the first female programmers at work on the ENIAC project. I shall bring into focus the contradiction between the perception of female labor by both male managers and media reports, and the effective, compound operations they carried out. In the second paragraph, I shall outline some emergent patterns of change in the conception of computer programming during the 1950s and the 1960s, with particular emphasis on the idea of programming as a “black art”, combining both analytic skills and creativity. The growth of the industry, thus the increase in economic and social interests around new computer jobs, fostered the emergence of two phenomena that shape each other: the devaluation of female labor on the one hand, the gendered debate on professionalism between the nascent computer science and the pragmatic approach to computer work on the other, which are illustrated in the third paragraph. Lastly, I shall recall the importance of aligning historical analysis and sociological investigation with feminist critique of science and technology. I argue, indeed, that such an analytical move is crucial in order to understand that pressing social issues such as gender inequalities in IT educational paths and careers require researchers to go beyond the assessment of figures and numbers so as to call into question the alleged “neutral” nature of technical expertise, professional status and labor organization. 2. Where are the women? The feminization of labor in the nascent digital computing The shortage of female workforce in IT industry and education is increasingly becoming a sensible issue, concerning both academic scholarship (see Margolis and Fisher 2002; Misa 2010; Abbate, 2012) and policy makers4. In order to investigate the 4 For a critical analysis of the term ‘Information Technology’, see Kline 2006. 105 profound roots of this phenomenon, it is important to go back to the early digital electronic computing era and to look at the role of female labor in the rising industry. There are several historical studies that have pointed out the prominent work of women in computer industry, both in the USA and UK. In an essay eloquently titled When Computers Were Women, Jennifer S. Light (1999) engages in retelling the development of the first general-purposes electronic computer, the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC), by shedding light on the large amount of women that worked as proto-programmers, very close to those engineers regarded as pioneers in the history of computing such as J. Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly. The main thesis advanced by Light is that the historiography of computing and computer labor has repeatedly dismissed the presence and the value of female work, fostering, that way, the popular image and belief of the programmer as a male job. However, a closer look at the dynamics that animated the nascent computing industry during wartime brings up more nuanced questions regarding the women’s employment: what is the nature of work undertaken by female employees at the time? What was the perception of female labor at the beginning of computing industry? What were the effective conditions behind the high number of women employed in computing careers? In addressing these queries, we can realize the pervasiveness of gendered assumptions and practices in computing industry, capable of shaping the nature of its expertise, organization of work and the purposes of computing itself. The outbreak of World War II engendered important changes in the US job market, since male workers were drafted into the army. Women were encouraged to apply for technical jobs, mostly concerning the assistant level. As Light underlines, in fact, apart from the women with a Ph.D. degree, the rest of the female workforce was intended as temporary, without any chance to climb up the job ladder. In Recoding Gender Women’s Changing Participation in Computing, Janet Abbate (2012) provides a reliable account about the early women programmers, remarking that the fundamental reason why women came to staff the first electronic digital computer was the lack of male manpower due to the war. It was just a contingency indeed, with the understanding that women would vacate those positions after the return of men, so as to restore the traditional gendered division of labor. Labor patterns in scientific and clerical 106 occupations are, in fact, at the base of the paradox that several scholars have recalled as characteristic of the role of women in early computer jobs (Light 1999; Abbate 2012, 2012; Payette 2014). The paradox consists in the complexity and degree of innovation conveyed by women’s work and the tendency from higher hierarchies and media to depict the same jobs as “unprofessional”. Although the members of the female workforce hired within the ENIAC project were not even recognized as individual identities, but commonly known as “ENIAC girls”, they took on tasks that demanded high levels of mathematical skills and, at the same time, they were downgraded as “subprofessional” (Light 1999). Although the ENIAC was designed to take over scientific calculations carried out by humans until then (Grier 2005), it was necessary to provide a certain amount of human labor as far as programming equations into the machine was concerned, a task undertaken by those human beings now called ‘operators’. They mainly work on ballistic studies with desk calculators and differential analyzers to program, handling complex tasks related to machine’s circuitry, logic, physical structure and operation. As Light highlights, the ENIAC project comprised two parts – hardware and software – clearly framed according to gender patterns: working with hardware was considered a men’s job, whereas software programming was usually undertaken by women and regarded as a secondary, clerical task. The mismatch between the actual work performed by women and the terms that employers and media coverage used to categorize it is one of the most controversial issues that is worth investigating, not only to reinstitute fairness into historical analysis, but also to provide a more nuanced understanding of sociotechnical processes, such as the gendered division of labor and the creation of specific expertise whereby the actors have constructed the technological frames (Bijker 1987) related to the nascent electronic computer. In an article published in 1996 in the Annals of the History of Computing, W.
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